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World Club Top 10: Pride of the Bashkirs

By Jeff Z. Klein December 6, 2007 12:22 pmDecember 6, 2007 12:22 pm

Well, the first posting of our World Club Top 10 rankings generated a, ahem, lively exchange of reader comments. We’ll address some of those comments in this posting — but first, here are the new rankings, updated through Wednesday’s games. The Russian Superliga team from Bashkortostan, Salavat Yulaev Ufa, still lead the way (more on them below as well).

Now then, about those comments, which seemed to split roughly down the lines of Europeans being intrigued by the idea and North Americans being very skeptical of it. Fair enough. But we’d caution anyone looking at these rankings not to take them quite so literally as a few readers seemed to do. They are not like American college football rankings, which actually are used to determine end-of-season championships. This Top 10 is instead a hypothetical general measurement of the relative strength of leagues and clubs across national borders.

Some people objected to seeing an NHL club ranked below European clubs and noted that the NHL is the richest league with the best players. True that, for sure. But anyone proclaiming an NHL team’s automatic superiority would do well to look at the experience of intercontinental competition in soccer, the sport hockey is emulating as it inaugurates the Victoria Cup tournament next September.

The whole planet recognizes that Europe is where the big money is in soccer; it has the richest clubs and leagues, and it draws the best players from around the world. Yet for almost half a century, the European club champion has played the South American club champion in an intercontinental championship, and the South American club has won half the time — despite the one-way traffic in talent from South America to Europe. Why have the underdogs done so well? There are enough skilled players and well-organized clubs in South America to continue to organize top-notch teams capable of beating richer opponents.

There is no question that similar conditions apply in Russian hockey, Swedish hockey, Finnish hockey, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe.

And now to the real point of these rankings, to look at some of the strong and important clubs on the other side of the Atlantic. We begin with Salavat Yulaev, the team from the city of Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan — which this year is celebrating the 450th anniversary of the Bashkir people’s joining with Russia and the 250th anniversary of the birth of Salavat Yulaev, the soldier, poet and national hero of the Bashkirs.

As is often the case in the Russian Superliga these days, the local government has suddenly decided to pour money and resources into the hockey club, which quite quickly becomes a powerhouse. The Bashkortostan government is doing just that, taking a page from neighboring Tatarstan. That republic and its oil company decided to mark the 400th anniversary of its union with Russia a couple of years ago by bankrolling Ak Bars Kazan to the Superliga championship, and although the title came a year late, Ak Bars did indeed win and become the flag bearer for Tatarstan.

The club from Bashkortostan, which like Tatarstan has a largely Muslim population, liked their neighbors’ approach so much that they didn’t merely emulate it — they signed four of the top players off the Ak Bars roster: goalie Aleksandr Yeremenko and the entire second line of Vitali Proshkin, Vladimir Vorobiev and Aleksei Tereshchenko. Salavat Yulaev promptly rocketed from last year’s good showing in the top half of the Superliga to the stratospheric pinnacle. Meanwhile Ak Bars, which won everything in sight last year, are currently 10th.

But it isn’t just the quartet from Ak Bars that’s powering Salavat. The club is stocked with a number of players who won the World Junior Championship in 2002 and ’03, coached by Sergei Gersonsky, who led that Russian junior team, and further buttressed by the signing this year of NHL veterans Oleg Tverdovsky and Aleksandr Perezhogin. (Salavat outbid the Montreal Canadiens for Perezhogin’s services by offering him $1.8 million for the year, three times the money he was making with Habs.)

This glittering roster is now housed in a brand-new arena. This season Salavat left their 4,200-seat Khrushchev-era Sports Palace and moved to the considerably more luxe 8,000-seat Ufa Arena.

It’s been a flawless season for Salavat so far. There’s been only one real blemish: On Dec. 4, they traveled to Kazan to play Ak Bars — and lost, 5-2.

It may seem ridiculous that the Red Wings wouldn’t be considered top of the list, and people can legitimately complain about the rankings.

However, reading this list and considering what has happened with economies in Europe versus in the US, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be until other leagues challenge the NHL as the best in the world. How long will it be before hockey is like soccer with highly competitive leagues in several countries in Europe, along with the US/Canada? And what, if anything, the NHL can do about it?

I could very well be wrong (there’s something you don’t often see in the comments of the NYT sports blogs), but I do think that such a time is still a little way off, Ed.

Before I can believe it, I’ll need to see in Europe some arenas get built with North American-style capacities and luxury boxes (there are a few in Europe, but for the most part only in the largest cities), as well as some big-time TV contracts signed. They’d probably need to be pan-European deals, too – I just don’t think that any one, single league over there is large enough to seriously compete with the NHL for players.

Huh? Regardless of the ‘better on any given day’ argument as to why a European team could defeat an NHL team on any given night, why develop a rankings with two Russian teams, two Czech teams and only one from the NHL? Surely, if any rankings is to have credence at all (this one doesn’t), it would seem logical to weigh more heavily the league that supplies 75 percent of all players in the World Cup and Olympic competitions? Last time I checked, that’s still the NHL …
Apparently we shouldn’t be taking this list ‘literally’, we should see it as some sort of figurative representation of Mr. Klein’s imagination perhaps. However we perceive this list, it leaves more questions than answers, breaking the number one rule of journalism: don’t write something you can’t support with evidence.

I still think the list has one major flaw. I has to be: Detroit Red Wings (USA)

Else please substitute all other country abbreviations with the corresponding League abbreviations.

This might actually make some people wonder how Canada, which is the nuber one supplier of hockey talent in the world as far as i am aware of, does not have a single club team in this list at all.

Do not mix up club (league) competition with international competition. Just take away all the swedes from the Red Wings and see if they make it in any list at all… Same goes with the canadians and americans on the german club teams. In europe, foreigners are most of the time the star players. Any star player european is most likely off to the NHL. German examples would be Marco Sturm and Jochen Hecht.

NYT ed.: Sure Canada has a team on the list, Force — Detroit! But seriously, we’re following the convention used in international club competitions in soccer by listing country rather than league. But for a rare league like the N.H.L. that jumps international borders, designations like “USA” or “CAN” become somewhat less meaningful. If the DEL also had a number of teams in Switzerland and Austria, we’d list those clubs as “DEL” rather than “GER”, “AUT” and “SUI”. That’s our rationale, anyway.

NHL is the 5th most profitable league in the world. It follows the NFL as #1, MLB, NBA, The English Premiership (soccer) and NHL at 5th.

Not a single European hockey league is even in the top ten. Now, if we combine all the EU and Russian hockey teams into one league (sorta like Soccers UEFA) then you might have a real league…but in European standards, Hockey ranks far behind Soccer and Basketball.

NYT ed.: Out of curiosity, Ken, where did you find the stats that show the NHL as the world fifth most profitable league?

I knew this statistic off the top of my head, I was reading an article on Forbes a while back. I have a thing being able to memorize useless information. Unfortunately I cant find the article. I probably read it at a hair dresser or found it lying around on the subway in Toronto.

The only source I can find online was on Wikipedia. I know what your thinking, its not a proper source. However, their appears to be a citation for this statistic.

NYT ed.: Wikipedia can be good, Ken, but this particular article seems pretty thin on citations and references. I duuno — maybe it’s true that the NHL is that strong financially, but I’d be pretty surprised if it were stronger than the big European soccer leagues in Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.

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